Innocent Blood
by ncfan
Summary: Delenn, and the moment in which she starts to wake up.


Disclaimer: I don't own Babylon 5.

* * *

_Home is behind__  
The world we know__  
The path that leads  
Down to the sea  
Is calling  
Is calling me home…_

Satai Delenn starts as she looks up, the words of the old song still chiming softly in her ears. She somewhat self-consciously adjusts the coarse gray hood of her heavy, flowing robes before standing up and walking down the hall to meet Hedronn.

"_Come see, Delenn. One of the Alyts has finished filing his report and has delivered it to me. He wished for you to see it."_

Hedronn is not in the Council chambers like she expected; for its tactical center, he has rarely left since they begun to speed towards the final destruction of the human's home world. _A terrible blot will soon be removed from the universe_.

Instead, he stands in a shadowed niche of a hallway, watching. His already solemn, slightly mournful face (the mournfulness is something that Delenn suspects to simply be a matter of her friend and colleague's facial structure and the fact that he rarely smiles), is ominously somber. Delenn feels a small 'twit' in the pit of her stomach. _Did we lose so many of our warriors?_

"Hedronn." She greets him with a Religious Caster's bow, which he returns in such a way to prevent the report file he holds from fluttering to the floor. "I am sorry that I was not able to accompany you and the rest of the Grey in the Council chambers; there were urgent matters among my clan that required my immediate attention."

He nods respectfully, recognizing her need to keep her clan together. "Here is the report for the recent battle."

Delenn reads the casualty report, and feels her heart seize. First, in some relief, that none of the humans (there were some five thousand at this outpost) seem to have survived. But also second, in that indeed many of their warriors have been wounded. _48 wounded, 6 dead. The names of the dead will be remembered with reverence, those martyrs in this holy war we wage. Dukhat, my dear friend, do you welcome them now?_

"It has gone well with us today." Delenn somehow manages to make her tone smooth and unruffled. "But I doubt you wished to speak with me simply because of our victory."

Hedronn nods, the shadows cast on his face growing darker and more portentous with each passing moment. "The humans fought more fiercely today than I think I have ever seen them fight."

Delenn nods, feeling her eyes grow downcast, despite themselves. "You called me to discuss that."

"It is no longer a matter of discussion, Delenn. I have discovered why." His eyes burn with a fire that seems to Delenn unholy. "Read the report more thoroughly."

Delenn flips open the file once more, and sees the pictures glisten before her eyes. Her eyes widen; her mouth turns dry.

_Their faces… They were so small…_

* * *

Later, in the privacy of her small, dark quarters, Delenn seeks comfort at her meditations.

_We are Grey._

_We stand between the candle, and the star._

_Between the Darkness, and the Light._

Her pale blue gray eyes flicker open, staring at the triluminary with a pall upon her heart. _But what happens, when those we kill are those whose hands were not stained with our blood?_

"_They…They should not have been killed," Delenn gasps, feeling suddenly very cold and small as though a great hand has reached out and clenched her soul. "They should have been spared."_

_Hedronn laughs harshly. "They are the enemy, Delenn. A stain upon all that lives. And as with all stains, they must be expunged without mercy."_

"_They were innocents!"_

"_They were humans!" Hedronn retorts, as though being human is enough to make one unclean._

Delenn looks at her hands. They are small, and pale, and smooth. But they are stained, she knows, stained with the blood of human martyrs, and no amount of penance will ever completely absolve her.

She remembers the pictures. In fact, she does not have to remember them, because they sit before her. Delenn begins to laugh, horribly, and her laughter is mixed with saline wetness. _Green eyes… _One of the faces, one of those pitifully _small _faces, had green eyes.

Minbari have only two eye colors. One is a pale blue, the blue of the sky in the middle of winter or the blue of the crystal plains of the southeast. The second is dark, dark brown, smooth dark brown like the pelt of a wild _harn_.

But this human, this small, delicate human, female, had green eyes. A beautiful, shining green, with flecks of amber like holy fire towards the center, green for life. Delenn stares at the autopsy pictures, the saline dampness dripping from her eyes. Fair, smooth skin, like that of a Minbari child. Small hands and feet, the toes slightly curved inward, like a Minbari child. Soft muscles and an unformed face, just like a Minbari child.

Her hands crumple the edge of the photo that showed the human's face, and she tosses it away.

During the battle, a transmission from one of the human fighters came through. It contained only one word. _'Monsters.'_ Delenn does not know what this word means; it was not translated into any language she could understand. But she heard the pain, sorrow, and rage in the voice of the human before he died, and she recoiled accordingly.

Delenn has not been in such turmoil since Dukhat died. The solid ground she built up for herself after he died—_The belief that what I did was right, that no price the humans paid could be too high to avenge my beloved mentor—_has suddenly been pulled out from under her feet, and where Delenn saw light, she now sees herself threatening to fall into shadow.

_I did not want this… I did not know…_

But it doesn't matter. Delenn can not lie to herself; these pictures she sees, the faces of the enemy (_They were _so_ small_), she will remember them for the rest of her life. She will remember the innocent blood that was shed on this day, and she will keep these pictures, as a reminder of what happens when vengeance is taken too far.

The human community they attacked on this day was not a military outpost, as they were led to believe by the heavy presence of human warships (_We tore through them as though they were made of parchment, but still they fought, still they came, and still they died_).

It was a civilian colony.

And somewhere, with the blood of innocents on her hands, a religious Satai begins to wake up.

* * *

"…No war is so just that those who wage it can walk away with no innocent blood on their hands."

—Bridget, Volume 7, Chapter 33 of _The Record of a Fallen Vampire_, authored by Kyo Shirodaira.

Too right.

* * *

The last line of the story is based on a line from "Ceremonies of Light and Dark." Delenn told the less-than-sane member of Nightwatch that when Dukhat died, her people had gone mad together, and that they stayed mad for a very long time. But then she told them that they woke up together.

I decided to make this moment, rather than the moment when she realized that Sinclair had a Minbari soul as the moment when Delenn herself started to wake up. Why? For the very simple reason that during the flashback in "Points of Departure" during the Battle of the Line, Delenn doesn't seem entirely enthusiastic about the battle. She comments that the humans fight bravely; that doesn't seem the sort of thing a Minbari who was gung-ho about the war would say.

Hope you liked it.


End file.
